When Hope for Healing Fades

Alicia Wright

When the hope of genuine healing fades, the battle for the chronically ill seems to shift from being primarily physical to enveloping both body and mind. I’ve been struggling lately with what to do with my thoughts when there’s not much logical hope left for healing.

Last month I had a week with three doctors’ appointments. All of them confirmed and reminded me of what my body has already been showing me lately—things are getting worse. Extra symptoms leading to extra diagnoses and the threat of more down the road. It wasn’t surprising to have that truth reflected back to me by my medical team, but I was still a bit shaken. I always hope beyond hope that this latest flare-up will settle and I’ll be back to a much better place, but lately it’s become tougher and tougher to say what’s a flare and what’s my new normal.

My illnesses are relatively slow-moving but very persistently progressive. So far, no treatment or intervention has forced them to hit the pause button. Hearing from my doctors what changes I should expect in the future—and how we might address them when they arrive—was unsettling.

There’s a place many of us come to with chronic illness or pain where doctors and our own bodies remind us that it’s only likely to go downhill from here. To some extent, that’s the human condition, right? We grow up, and not long after, we realize that our bodies are slowly and minutely headed toward breakdown. We all have to grapple with this reality, but if you’re living in a broken body, it accelerates that human condition in a way healthy people don’t experience. It pushes us to think beyond the norm and forces us to grapple with the frustrations of living in a body that feels many years past its current age.

If you have a progressive illness, you know it can feel like there are really only two possible roads forward. First, we may keep sliding into more pain and more struggles with physical function—living an interminably long time with dysfunction and suffering, perhaps eventually becoming unable to care for ourselves. Second, an illness could become life-threatening, and we may be forced to leave much sooner than we’d ever want.

There’s a repeated theme I’m beginning to see in the community of Christians who live with chronic pain. Obviously, we want relief from pain and we want to live healthy, long lives. But even when much of our health and function are taken away, we still don’t necessarily want to go. Despite daily pain and fear, we don’t typically wake up most mornings genuinely wanting to go home today.

I was trying to explain this conundrum to a healthy friend a while ago. We want to be with Jesus eventually, but we definitely don’t want our pain or illnesses to get worse, and (as a whole) we don’t want to go yet. Carrying the weight of something horrible and painful that we know may eventually be defeating, leads to strange logic. We don’t really want to live another forty years in pain, but we also certainly don’t want to hear that we have only hours left. Too much broken life or too little broken life can both feel undesirable. If we can’t have the healthy life we desire, we’re left with a conundrum we feel we can’t escape and have no control over.

But what if we can look forward and see darkness—be nearly sure of that darkness—and still sing, pray, write, worship, and love? What if we can be those the poet wrote of:

“They have seen Death and ultimate defeat,
And yet they would not in despair retreat”?

If you live in pain, you look death and ultimate defeat in the face all day long, every day. The struggle between our hearts and our bodies is real and powerful. We all know we’ll die one day, but pain carries with it the aroma of death, and pain’s constant presence will do its level best to push you into a despairing retreat.

The two most obvious roads forward—a life of pain that feels too long or a life of pain that feels too short—may be knocking, but we can look them in the eye, sit with them, and then hold to the path we’ve been given today. God is good, and He does good, and that truth is comforting even when the good He’s doing feels terribly un-good. We can trust this good God and know that He is making something beautiful out of us, whether our time here is short or long. In His goodness, He sees to it that even our brokenness is not wasted.